


golden suns and ivory flowers

by ladynova



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 04:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7559974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladynova/pseuds/ladynova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the dragon-princess unfolds a hoshidan scroll with utmost caution and summons violet spirits in the night, and the second prince watches from the treetops, drunk on love and euphoria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	golden suns and ivory flowers

**Author's Note:**

> my love for leon is as deep as the sea and i hope i never stop writing about him (plus check that word count, so even, so clean)

Kamui possesses a presence that smolders, a presence that has long etched itself into Leon’s skin and permeated his very bones. Her presence is one he knows by heart, even more so than the pages of ancient script comprising his beloved Brynhildr, so when it trickles from his senses as he rides outward from the heart of the ravaged, war-torn battlefield, he notices, seamlessly pulling his horse to a calculated stop and pivoting in place to seek the winter-haired princess.

Although Leon has not an ounce of doubt in Kamui’s skill and aptitude for combat, there is no helping the instinctual rush of adrenaline that floods through him; the thought of a concealed enemy having ambushed Kamui when his back was turned pains him more than anything in the world, but his earthen eyes find her easily in the dissolving fray, the dichotomy of her snow hair and ink ensemble a stark contrast against the blood-soaked soil beneath them. It is admittedly a strange sight, seeing her knees to the ground and back curved forward when her spine has always been laced with unyielding etiquette that commanded she stand and sit and _breathe_ in a way that is so polished she shines with all the poise a princess of the royal family ought to have.

For a second Leon thinks she is mourning the dead: corpses of people she may have known, may have lived among, may have greeted good morning and good night (but never _goodbye_ , like she is today), had she chosen a path different from the one she walks now. It is nothing short of a somber concept, but the second prince of Nohr has never had a single regretful thought regarding her decision to stay. He would not hesitate to tell her how his heart only continued to beat because she chose to return home with him on that fateful day, but for the sake of his damnable ego and accursed pride he decides to only confess to her his hamartia if it is absolutely necessary.

Leon calls her name as he nears her, it being the most natural word to fall from his tongue. Her eyes are rubies when they meet his, but they do not swirl with despair or tears as he had almost expected. She stands, and he hears _Leon_ leave her lips as a soothing exhale. Although he cannot help but wonder if she has grown more competent at sewing the mask she sometimes wears after battles onto her features, the smile she grants him is resplendent enough to cast away his worries.

He extends his free hand to her, and she falls into step with him so effortlessly it must be second nature, her palms behind her back and her back against the golden sun.

* * *

At the precipice of sundown, Leon examines the bushes blooming with ivory flowers beneath Kamui’s treehouse with unparalleled meticulousness as she sits in the shade a few steps to his right, one of his tomes open in her lap and a sharp crease upon her brow. The prince glances at her wordlessly, plucking a particularly full blossom with willowy fingers before halving their distance. As he takes a seat next to her, he catches fragments of barely-whispered words escaping her lips, but he does not recognize them as the ones written into the leaves of his tome. 

He bends toward her, weaving the flower into the waves of winter hair just above her right ear, and she pauses, hands curling at the edges of vellum pages. She shows him a sideways smile and features aflush, but there is something amiss about her that catches Leon’s attention immediately, a telltale cloudiness marring her usual crystalline clarity.

She speaks before he can, and he leans into her words. “How many years,” she asks, crimson irises meeting his, “did it take you to master magic?”

“A day and a half,” Leon tells her without hesitation, and the jest brings laughter to her lips and light to her eyes. “But my tutors say I am something of a prodigy, and I still have much to learn.”

Kamui pulls his hands into hers, and the warmth of her skin steeps into his as naturally as he can breathe air. She studies the lines running over his otherwise immaculate hands; they are lines that she knows, lines that she has memorized and can recreate with undeniable precision. “Then perhaps it would take me seven days,” she says, after a few moments of pressing her palms to his.

His side slants against hers. “Give yourself some credit, love.”

“I admire you,” she murmurs, bringing his knuckles to her lips.

“I know,” he says and inhales sharply as she nudges him. “I feel the same for you, tenfold."

* * *

Leon drifts in and out of sleep as Kamui shifts in his arms, turning so she faces him in the dark. When he feels her fingers graze over his resting features, the fog of slumber dispels from his mind, and he is rendered more or less awake beneath closed eyelids. Despite how he yearns to steal a glance at Kamui’s expression, he feigns sleep still, instead listening to the silence of the room as her fingers draw themselves over and over his skin with an idle sort of affection that makes his pulse thrum at his chest. 

Kamui angles her face to settle at the crook of Leon’s neck for minutes and minutes on end, until his heartbeat somehow learns to slow in her hands. Without opening his eyes, he softly presses his lips to the crown of her head and hopes she takes it as a natural habit, even in his feigned sleep. He hears her exhale the quietest of laughs, and she curls her arms tighter around him in response to the gesture. Minutes blur into hours, and Leon is toying with the edge of a nostalgic dream when Kamui carefully unlaces herself from him, slides open a drawer, and tiptoes out into the night.

Sitting up at the edge of their bed, Leon rubs the sleep from his eyes, helping himself to his feet and pacing toward the open window letting cool air circulate the room. Even from the treetop, his sharp eyesight enables him to catch a glimpse of a white-haired dragon-girl fanning out a scroll in her hands, and although her back is turned to him, he knows her eyes are tracing over each of the written words in turn, memorizing their curves and slopes as though it is her fate. He thinks back to the princess kneeling over the fallen soldier, her hands remaining at her back as they left him there, and everything falls into place.

As she assumes a stance that is a strange but fitting combination of a Nohrian dark mage’s and a Hoshidan spellcaster’s, Leon wonders how many hours she has spent studying mages back home and in combat. In the darkness, the ink of the scroll’s ancient text glows a liquid, glittering gold that reflects all the light of the moon as Kamui’s voice brings its words to life, and Leon finds himself oddly enamored with the way her usually clear voice stumbles through the foreign, age-old Hoshidan tongue that, in another life, she would have been able to speak effortlessly.

(Leon holds his breath.)

Kamui finishes the incantation with a growing confidence, and a small, violet spirit bursts from her palm in the night, bathing her in amethyst and moonshine.

(He exhales.)

She stands in awe as it fades just as quickly as it had been born, glancing back to her divine Yato blade speared into the earth a wingspan away before composing herself (as Marx had taught her), taking a deep breath (as Leon had instructed), and readying herself for another attempt (as Camilla had always urged). And with all due grace and dignity of a princess of Nohr, Kamui resumes the incantation in the foreign tongue, her voice sailing through the words upon her second try.

What Leon can decipher sounds like a poem, an elegy even, of love and loss, nostalgia and mourning—an apostrophe to a loved one the writer can no longer hold and to a lost place that can be visited only in dreams. He smiles sadly: the scroll’s contents are bittersweet but uncannily fitting.

“How odd it is to see you dabbling with magic, Kamui,” Leon says later, leaning against the frame of the window as the second spirit—of considerable hue and size—fades. Kamui seems to freeze in place at the sound of his voice, and the sight brings laughter to his lips. She turns to face him, slowly but surely, her features still retaining colors of mauve and now roseate as she peers up at him from her place on the ground. “Even more so with its source being a Hoshidan scroll. Tell me, are Nohrian tomes not to your liking?”

There is no edge, only curiosity, to Leon’s inquiry, but Kamui still wilts at his words, clutching the scroll to her chest. “How could I have stolen away with a tome back at the castle when you knew the whereabouts of each one at every given moment of the day?” she returns, with a tinge of exasperation as Leon turns for the exit of her treehouse, making his way down its winding staircase with rhythmic footsteps.

“I never knew our own Kamui had an interest in magic,” Leon says, and he smirks at how quick she is to roll her eyes at the futile lie. “But I must say, I did notice that some of my tomes would go missing more than the others.”

Kamui’s fingers lift to her forehead in embarrassment, her face flooding with color. “Oh, gods, so you did know! I’ve always had an inkling that you noticed, but you never did say a thing!”

Leon extends a hand to her as he had done on the battlefield, and this time, she takes it. “I could have helped you,” he tells her, quietly. “I would have helped you in a heartbeat.”

“I didn’t want you to find me any more incompetent than you already did,” Kamui sighs, “but I suppose I’ve had enough of that. I want to protect you and everyone dear to me, so when my sword won’t reach, I need to have magic at hand.”

“Wise words. It seems our tactic lessons have been paying off.” Kamui quiets as Leon runs a thumb over the river-lines of her hand, traversing back and forth across its smooth cartography. “You have great magical potential; I can feel it—even more than Marx and Camilla, I daresay,” he murmurs, studying her skin for the thousandth time in his life. “With the right teacher, I do believe you could become a formidable tome-wielder someday.”

A smile lights Kamui’s face, and Leon can’t help how his heart flutters. “How lucky I am,” she says, curling her fingers against his before releasing his hand.

“I could say the same.”

As he crosses his arms squarely across his chest, an all too familiar stern expression settles at its place upon Leon’s features, although it is somewhat subdued in the moonlight. He nods as Kamui fans out the scroll in her hands, angling her body so that the spirit will erupt into the night. “Once again, from the top,” he tells her, but her voice has already begun to soar through the incantation. He finds himself still oddly enamored with the way she speaks the foreign, age-old Hoshidan tongue.

(Leon holds his breath.)

A herculean violet spirit escapes from her palm in the wake of her fading words, and she turns to him with an almost childlike excitement that warms him to the bone.

(He exhales.)

He smiles at her, thoughts as pristine as ever despite drunken, drunken love surging through him; the way she looks up at him, links their fingers together, pulls him close, and leans upward – it is nothing short of magic.


End file.
